Profane's disassembling dream dream?

[Ian Livingston]

Boy, I'd be ready to jump on board with this if I didn't know how the
story ends. As it is, I have to ask: Does Benny become a thing which
is then undone?

There are some resonances with the street, especially The Street as
all that ever was, that strongly echo Taoism. I brought this up before
to resounding silence, but, given the cultural milieu in which Pynchon
wrote V., I have to raise it again. Taoism and Zen where everywhere
with the hip scene. Zen had the greater popular following, but Zen is
a hybrid of Buddhism and Taoism with a Japanese twist, so, either way,
the Tao figures there. The Tao is the way, the path, the street; it is
all that ever is, just as it is, nothing fancy. But if you try to
exclude yourself or anything else from it, you get wonky in the world.

So I ask: Does Benny become a thing which is then undone, or does he
just get wonky in the world?


On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 5:49 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> YES, that's it...or one way of being IT from other postings...
>
> The umbilical cord uses, twice, in Chap 1 of V.......
>
> The tie to home........which, when one leaves it for the Street
> turns one mechanical and able to fall apart with one turn of the screw!
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
> To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sat, July 3, 2010 8:38:20 AM
> Subject: Re: Profane's disassembling dream dream?
>
> Mark Kohut wrote:
>
>>   To Profane, alone in the street, it would always seem maybe he was
>> looking for something too to make the fact of his own dissassembly
>> plausible as that of any machine. [... skipping paragraphs] This was
>> all there was to dream; all there ever was: the Street."
>>
>> Things fall apart...An early foreshadowing of V.'s final disassembled
>> demise...The screwdriver symbolism of the flaneur?
>>
>
>
> alice's pointed out the Mechanical Bride syndrome...
> that fits pretty well here
>
> lacking that when I originally read the book, what I empathized with
> was how he had had a home with a Mom, grew up and out of that, then
> sort of had a home in the Navy, which (for the purposes of a rabidly
> anti-militaristic reading, which probably doesn't completely square
> with the author's intentions, since he himself entered the Service,
> although it isn't ruled out since he did leave the Service) provided
> him with a sort of jaundiced viewpoint regarding hierarchy ("Down with
> all you rich bastards") and also a mechanical familiarity with
> dissasembly derived from prolonged proximity to engines both of
> destruction (artillery and their effects in use) and propulsion (and
> the continuing mechanical maintenance and stripping down and
> rebuilding and applying tools)
>
> the colonialist impulse masquerades as a mechanical fix to the
> problems which anyone from a more advanced culture can see in a
> primitive culture, sending in skilled workers to the figurative engine
> room - but (and unavoidably, since defraying the expenses of the
> endeavour entails appropriating the potential capital with which the
> primitive society could develop, and the denizens' reasonable
> objections aren't taken seriously, as a rule...) more often than
> anybody would like, really comes to mean the application of the
> appetite for destruction... that is to say, in the dream/joke
> mingling, the tree of nature bears a strange fruit containing a tool,
> and in a friendlier dreamscape, this would entail the ensuance of
> existentiality (whoops, quoting Joyce again, same passage as the "mead
> for misery" or pretty close...) ...
> RESET
> ...rather, in a friendlier dreamscape, there would be other tools to
> deal with the butt that had been removed, bore it out or whatever,
> open up the innards ("stomach, oilpan, same difference" - wasn't that
> a Cheech and Chong routine?), revamp the holding assembly - probably
> some kind of reference to the dependence on parents that the
> navel-placement of the golden screw points to - maybe pull in a
> designer (there are a bunch of skilled designers that used to work
> around Detroit that could probably do this, eh...and quite likely some
> more ex-NASA dudes and dudettes...) to design some kind of snap-ring
> or strut arrangement that would clasp the arse directly to the hips -
> and replace the gaskets and put it back on, and most of all there'd be
> a shop or drydock in which this was taking place...but instead he's
> out on the Street and only has the one tool...
>
> worse than Rommel's plight in GR - at least he had his ass handed to
> him ("Ach, mein Arsch!") - Benny just sees the part fall off and,
> because he's a schlemihl and inanimate things do not love him so much,
> he's unprepared to reapply the part although really that sort of
> upgrade/retrofit would seem like a really good idea for a guy like
> him!
>
>
>
> --
> Yippy dippy dippy,
> Flippy zippy zippy,
> Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
> - Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."